Start making sense
At RealClearPolitics Tom Bevan has circled back to examine John Kerry's support for unilateral military action to remove Saddam Hussein as expressed in a November 1997 Senate speech prompted by the removal of UN weapons inspectors: "The 1997 Senate speech that damns John Kerry."
In the speech Kerry states: "This is not a matter about which there should be any debate in the Security Council or, certainly, in this Nation." In his conclusion Kerry asserts the desirability of multilateral military action, but asserts his support for unilateral miliarty action "if in the final analysis we face what we truly believe to be a grave threat to the well-being of our Nation and our entire world and it cannot be removed peacefully[.]"
Bevan asks: "So is it plausible for John Kerry to have believed in 1997 that Saddam was a grave threat requiring the use of significant, preemptive, and unilateral military force but to now - more than five years later and in a post-9/11 world - stand before us and argue the opposite?" And answers: "It is not."
In the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur cruelly strips away the illusion that Kerry would somehow be capable of expanding the multilateral coalition President Bush has assembled in Iraq: "European honeymoon won't happen for Kerry." Vinocur reports:
[L]ast week, just after Kerry's major speech on the war in which he insisted that the United States "must make Iraq the world's responsibility" and that others "should share the burden," [German Chancellor Gerhard] Schröder's sense of courtesy collided with reality and he drove a spike into the notion. He told reporters, "We won't send any German soldiers to Iraq, and that's where it's going to remain."To the same effect, though with less bite, is the Financial Times article: "No French or German turn on Iraq."Clear? A faint irony slips in at this point. For many Europeans, the problem in making sense of Kerry's speech was not Schröder's rather predictable reply, but how much delusion or candor there was in the Democrat's campaign promise to enlist countries opposed to the war to bail out the United States militarily. Add to that the candidate's linked idea of leveraging a notional European military presence into a pullout by some American troops as early as next summer. It seemed enough to make Kerry's continental friends cringe.
UPDATE: Thanks to the many readers who wrote to point out a typographical error that I have now corrected.
